Barry Estabrook Lecture
Wednesday, March 25, at 7 p.m.
Ford Center at the University of Mississippi in Oxford
Investigative food journalist Barry Estabrook is visiting Oxford later this month, thanks to the SFA and the University of Mississippi’s Center for Writing and Rhetoric. Estabrook, a former contributing editor of the late Gourmet magazine, will speak Wednesday, March 25, at the Ford Center at 7 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
Stints working on a dairy farm and a commercial fishing boat as a young man convinced Estabrook that writing about food production was much easier than actually producing it. In his 2011 book Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, he investigated the factory farms and slave labor of large-scale tomato production in Florida. As Ruth Reichl said, “If you have ever eaten a tomato – or ever plan to – you must read ‘Tomatoland.’ It will change the way you think about America’s most popular ‘vegetable.’ More importantly, it will give you new insight into the way America farms.”
Estabrook has written for the the New York Times, the Washington Post, TheAtlantic.com, MarkBittman.com, Saveur, Men’s Health, Reader’s Digest, and others. He lives on a farm in Vermont, where he is working on his next book, “Pig Tales: An Omnivore’s Guide to Sustainable Meat,” which W. W. Norton will publish on June 8, 2015. His blog, www.politicsoftheplate.com, received the 2011 James Beard Award for best food blog.
*Please note that this lecture was originally scheduled for February, but had to be canceled due to inclement weather.